Well, which brings us to now I’m gonna list some of the financial decisions that we made over the years that have accumulated to putting Being in my current possession.

First getting my job with the status of South Carolina meeting Tess at the school for death boy I simply wanted to be a social worker. She wanted to be a nurse. She had intentions of going back to the hospital even when we first met and I only had intentions of continuing to be a social worker, but that led me to being at DSS in child protection, which to me was real social work I then went from there to the continuum of care and became a supervisor and then went back to DSS as the job developer so that was my state of South Carolina career in a nutshell 30 years with DSS continue of care and then teaching at Swanberg tech, which was another dream come true because being able to teach computer skills, which is something I taught myself never having taken a lesson. I felt like that was a pretty big accomplishment now could I have done better probably so you know I look at guys like Jeff Bezos, who turned his website selling books you know into Amazon probably the biggest the greatest company of all time and I followed Amazon right from the very beginning. I eventually bought stock but not early enough as everything else that I’ll say I did invest in the stock market. I took the hundred thousand that we got through the Teri program and invested it and watched it grow. I had also been saving on a monthly basis in my 401(k) plan and that added to our overall savings, the one mistake I feel like I made was tapping into Social Security at age 60 or maybe age 62 but not waiting until I was 70 waiting until 70 would’ve made a Reasonable increase in my monthly income but no no sense in crying over spelt milk I’ve been very very fortunate and right now I feel like I have more than enough money to see me through still living a very frugal lifestyle ironically, you know setting my thermostat at 63° in the winter and I don’t know maybe 73° in the summer. My net worth at this particular point is about 1.2 or 3 million which just to say that out loud is quite amazing. Never in my life dreams that I think I’d be a millionaire but now it seems as though that’s almost a necessity nonetheless I wouldn’t be here if we had not invested early and stayed with it but again I have to tell the truth But this was a total team effort. I told Tess Wright the very very early stages that we needed to buy a house instead of renting so we bought our first house. I also told her that she needed to sign up for the retirement program which at that point she had not done so those two decisions made a huge difference in our life plan we were able to pay for our mortgage instead of rent and even though that was difficult at times, at least we had something to show for it so to make a quick list getting and keeping a job with retirement plan, which was the state of South Carolina and sticking with that job for 30 years buying a home instead of renting we ended up buying four homes that we lived in 120 Winton Court 145 Dover Rd. 125 Waterford Dr. and 210 White Creek Dr. I also bought a townhome at West Point Dr. where Lauren lived and paid rent and I rented that for a few more years after she left and then the property of carriage park which we sold I think we broke even on that. So ironically, we probably made the most money percentage wise on Winton Court where we only stayed like two years but then I rented Dover Road and rental property is a mixed bag of income and liability or overhead. You don’t really make much money because you’re spending all your money on taxes and fixing up the place. It cost me about $15,000 to sell Dover Road. I mean we sold it for I forget about over 100,000 so we obviously made some money but not much. Our best investments have been stocks and my method there was to buy Fidelity select funds in different sectors, computer computers, computer software medical retail. After staying with those select funds for a number of years, I looked at them and analyzed their holdings and realized that several companies were in several of the mutual funds so at that point, I bought the stocks themselves, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Apple those four stocks really became the bedrock of our investments and since then I’ve put money into QQQ and now into nuclear energy funds that I consider the future and we’ll see .

But essentially, it was following the advice of my friendship and also my common sense to get out of debt. We went through a period where we had a lot of credit card debt. It was very upsetting. It cost a lot of friction between Tess and I, but she also felt very bad about it so I just laid down the gauntlet and paid off that debt using a second mortgage and then paying off the second mortgage and never using credit cards again so we got out of that financial pinch successfully. I do use a credit card now because I found that getting points actually does pay off as long as you pay off your balance every month.